The ultimate beauty of psyche is that which even Aphrodite does not have and which must come from Persephone, who is queen over the dead souls and whose name means “bringer of destruction." The Box of Beauty which Psyche must fetch as her last task refers to an underworld beauty that can never be seen with the senses. It is the beauty of the knowledge of death and of the effects of death upon all other beauty that does not contain this knowledge. Psyche must “die" herself in order to experience the reality of this beauty, a death different from her suicidal attempts. This would be the ultimate task of soul-making and its beauty: the incorporation of destruction into the flesh and skin, embalmed in life, the visible transfigured by the invisibility of Hades's kingdom, anointing the psyche by the killing experience of its personal mortality. The Platonic upward movement toward aestheticism is tempered by the beauty of Persephone. Destruction, death, and Hades are not left out. Moreover, Aphrodite does not have access to this kind of beauty. She can acquire it only through Psyche, for the soul mediates the beauty of the invisible inner world to the world of outer forms.
Salt is the mineral substance or objective ground of personal experience making experience possible. No salt, no experiencing- merely a running on and running through of events without psychic body. Thus salt makes events sensed and felt, giving us each a sense of the personal–my tears, my sweat and blood, my taste and value.
The entire alchemical opus hangs on the ability to experience subjectively. Hence it is said in The Golden Tract: “He who works without salt will never raise dead bodies.” The matters are only macrocosmic and chemical, out there, dead unless one works with salt. These intensely personal experiences which give taste and flavor to events are nonetheless common to all-both mine and yet common as blood, as urine, as salt. In other words, salt acts like the ground of subjectivity (“That which is left at the bottom of our distilling vessel is our salt-that is to say our earth.”). It makes possible what psychology calls felt experience. So, we must turn to this same ground to mine our salt.
James Hillman, Salt
(Continued in the Captions for each photo)
Felt experience takes on a radically altered meaning in the light of alchemical salt. We may imagine our deep hurts not merely as wounds to be healed but as salt mines from which we gain a precious essence and without which the soul cannot live. The fact that we return to these deep hurts, in remorse and regret, in repentance and revenge, indicates a psychic need beyond a mere mechanical repetition compulsion. Instead, the soul has a drive to remember; it is like an animal that returns to its salt licks; the soul licks at its own wounds to derive sustenance therefrom. We make salt in our suffering and, by working through our sufferings, we gain salt, healing the soul of its salt-deficiency.Salt requires a pinch, feeling the pinch of the event that stings; lead seems to require time, waiting it through. What results from the salt cure is a new sense of what happened, a new appreciation of its virtue for soul. Salt may also be mined from whatever is stable. As the principle of stability whose alchemical sign was a square, salt can be mined from the rocks of concrete experience, those fixities which mark our lives with defined positions. These places are not merely solid facts-my degree, my property, my car accident, my war record, my divorce; these are also places where psychic body is salted away and stored. These rocks, when recognized and owned, belong to the history of my soul, where it has been salted down by the fixities of experience, giving a certain crystallization to my nature and keeping me from inflammations and volatilizations.Though we do not make it by fire, we do make salt by means of dissolutions. Salt is soluble. Weeping, bleeding, sweating, urinating bring salt out of its interior underground mines. It appears in our moistures, which are the flow of salt to the surface. “During the work the salt assumes the appearance of blood” (CW’ 14, 8337). Moments of dissolution are not mere collapses; they release a sense of personal human value from the encrustations of habit. “I too am a human being worth my salt”-hence my blood, sweat, and tears.Viewed from the perspective of salt, early traumas are moments of initiation into the sense of being a me with a subjective personal interior. We tend to fixate on what was done to us and who did it: resentment, revenge. But what psychologically matters is that it was done: the blow, the blood, the betrayal. Like the ashes which are rubbed into the wounds at initiation rites to purify and scarify, the soul is marked by its trauma. Salt still is touched to the body in Christian Baptism, and eaten still at Jewish Pessach in ritual remembrance of trauma. A trauma is a salt mine; it is a fixed place for reflection about the nature and value of my personal being, where memory originates and personal history begins. These traumatic events initiate in the soul a sense of its embodiment as a Vulnerable experiencing subject.The paradigmatic story of “looking back” is that of Lot’s wife. (Lot and Lot’s wife were even used as alchemical terms for salt- Jobnson’s Dictionary.) Because Lot’s wife could not refrain from looking back at the destruction of Sodom from which they had been saved, she was turned to a pillar of salt. Jewish commentators on the tale say that her mother-love made her look behind to see whether her married daughters were following; and Christian comments on Luke 17:32 also see the source of her move in remembrances of family and relatives, personal subjectivities of feeling. Evidently, family fixations are also salt mines. The disappointments, worries, smarts of mother-complex love–the evening with the photograph album, the keepsakes- are ways the psyche produces salt, returning to events in order to turn them into experiences.The danger here is always fixation, whether in recollection, childhood trauma, or in a literalized and personalized notion of experience itself: “I am what I have experienced.” Paracelsus defined salt as the principle of fixation (Il:366).
Dreamtime January 26, 2017 (Holographic Explorations)
I am in a very subtle dimensional space and my intent is to explore various particles of my Body, I focus my energy and travel into different parts of my self, each fragment containing the Whole. I feel as if I am recalibrating and retuning myself, so that I can align with my Will in a way that will have positive repercussions for my waking world. There is a theme also of astrological axis'. I am exploring energetically my particular blueprint/program for this current RPG consensus reality.…..pondering how I can best use the Code I wrote myself into, upon entering this dimension at birth. There is a Code for every expression of Self here, and it expresses itself via the natal chart in each person that comes to Embody that Facet of the Whole. Like a computer program, each code is made of basic archetypal energies/ sourceSelves that act as a script……that our embodiment plays out in an unfolding Drama. I focus on my fixed axis of Asc/Scorpio Dsc/Taurus MC/Leo/ IC/Aquarius…and the fact the nodal axis is exactly conjunct the vertical MC/IC axis.and that the 'rulers/archetypes/source codes' of each of the fixed poles are conjunct each other.ie the ruler of my asc/scorpio (pluto) is exactly conjunct the ruler of my Dsc/Taurus (Venus) in the 12th house and the rulers of my IC/MC axis (Sun and Uranus) are exactly conjunct in my 1st house. 12th being akin to the formless/ the 1st as Self, thus the two acting to bring the poles together. So all four rulers are in deep communion. I see the vertical axis depth of Being, and the horizontal axis as Breadth of Being. Vertical axis/spine/nervous system/world tree...horizontal axis extended arms/creative linear expression of one particula facet of SElf in a manifested world. 'Man cannot live by Bread'th alone' ; ) I also reflect upon the fact that my Mars is exact conjunct the 'galactic center' or 'black sun' or 'great central sun' or 'dark rift' or center of milky way. I realize this is like a direct connection to the central core processor of this holographic playscape creation program .
..I ruminate on the metaphor and reflection of the Trip event, ( age 19 eating 13 hits acid and the experience that was catalyzed) ….which was strongly energized by Astro-transits…. And being plugged in to the Universal Telephone…overwhelmed by the codes and equations of this creation, to the point where I had the choice of whether to come back into the game, or to continue on surfing the fractals in an entirely different focal point of Self. All this is going through my lucid dreaming awareness, and I then realize that I was sleeping with my right arm straight above my head, and my left along the side of my body, and that I do that often, and that it seems connected to the circuit of energy connection between my dreamingbody and physical body…as if I am plugging in. I am then in a dual state of awareness of my physical environment and my Dream environment, which is more like a holographic field of information. As I begin to stir from the Dreaming, I analyze the fact That the more I learn to penetrate the Codes that make up my Earth body design and formation (natal chart energies as particle expressions of that exact moment in the 'universe' expressing itself in this dimension as Charleen while in the deeper dimensions expressed as Waveform fluid fractal self)…the more fully I can express That Which I Am.So do we choose which facet of the universe we want to experience, and live out as Self, and then step into the script/program........or are we chosen?
“⭐️This book changed the way I look at dreams, or maybe the book taught me what my heart always wanted me to understand. Hillman looks at the dream as happening in the “Underworld” – a place of death – and wants us to enter into that world to understand the dream instead of trying to drag the dream up into the day-world by interpreting it.
Some quotes from the book:
“Freud’s method projects the persons in a dream back over the bridge into the dream-day, even if for the sake of their latent meaning. We associate my dream-brother and dream-father to my day-brother and day-father and, by this association, return the dream to the day. Jung’s method of interpretation on the subjective level takes the dream persons into the subject of the dreamer. They become expressions of my psychic traits. They are introjected into my personality. In neither method do we ever truly leave the personal aspect of the dream persons, and thus they remain in the upperworld. Dare I say it loud and clear? The persons I engage with in dreams are neither representations of their living selves nor parts of myself. They are shadow images that fill archetypal roles; they are personae, masks, in the hollow of which is numen.”
“Public performance on a stage, perhaps because it puts us into the underworld of theatre, also constellates the curious interplay between life-soul and image-soul. The almost depersonalization experience of stage fright makes one feel deserted by one’s soul. All that one memorized and trained for has suddenly vanished. It is as if another soul must play the role, and this moment of going on stage is like a rite de passage, a transition into death.”
“For a dream image to work in life it must, like a mystery, be experienced as fully real. Interpretation arises when we have lost touch with the images, when their reality is derivative, so that this reality must be recovered through conceptual translation. Then we try to replace its intelligence with ours instead of speaking to its intelligence with ours.”
Hillman notes that when we see a killer in a dream, we tend to fear him. But Hillman looks at this figure as a helper who is trying to initiate us into the Underworld land-of-the-dead; the dream world: “There is a divine death figure in the killer, either Hades, or Thanatos, or Kronos-Saturn, or Dis Pater, or Hermes, a death demon who would separate consciousness from it life attachments.
Hillman, in one section of the book describes the circus as a metaphor of the Underworld: “Where else but the circus will we ever see the underworld in daylight: the tent of enclosed space, the rings, everyone as close to death as his or her art will allow, the freaks of nature that are beyond nature, and above all, the precise performances of repetitive nonsense, as if Ixion, Tantalus, and Sisyphus had once worked for Ringling Brothers.”
“The comic spirit masquerades in all things we do and say; we are each a joke and do not need to put on a white face. The matter is not one of becoming a clown but of learning what he teaches: making an art of our senseless repetitions, our collapsing and our pathologizings, putting on the face of death that allows the dream world in and watching it turn ordinary objects into amazing images, our public persons into butts of laughter.”
“Unfortunately psychology emphasizes attention and recall; the dayworld wishes to have, must absolutely have, a ‘good memory’; a bad memory is more devastating to success than is a bad conscience. Forgetting therefore becomes a pathological sign. But depth psychology based on an archetypal perspective might understand forgetting as serving a deeper purpose, seeing in these holes and slips in the dayworld the means by which events are transformed out of personal life, voiding it, emptying it. Somehow we must come to better terms with Lethe, since she rules many years, especially the last years, and we would be foolish to dismiss her work only as pathological. The romantics took Lethe most seriously.”⭐️
James Kulm, in reference to the book ‘The Dream and the Underworld’ by James Hillman
{self portrait series Kennedy Peak 8-6-24 part 4 ::::The SilverScreen of the Underworld Dream }
~all photo captions contain quotes/excerpts from the book by Hillman
UNDERGROUND AND UNDERWORLD When using the word underworld, it is imperative to keep in mind a distinction made by some classicists. This distinction is of great psychological importance, because it frees the psychic realm from nature. Chthon and ge (“underworld” and “underground”) do not necessarily refer to the same region or evoke identical feelings. “Chthon with its derivatives refers in origin to the cold, dead depths and has nothing to do with fertility. “This kind of deep ground is not the same as the dark earth; and the Great Lady (potnia chthon), who sends black-winged dreams and who can also be called Erinys, cannot simply be merged into the single figure of the Great Earth Mother.Psychology’s great-mother complex has swallowed even her own differentiations. Small wonder that this complex is also called “uroboric consciousness,” for even she herself vanishes into an interpretive monotony that makes me believe that the monotheistic psychology I so often belabor is less a mimesis of ancient Hebrewism (within and alongside of which there was much space for imaginal variety) than it is a mimesis of the Great Mother. Monism as Momism. Be this as it may, when we read analytical psychology today to discover about the ‘chthonic,’ we find it has taken on her meaning of primitive earthiness. Morever, as primitive and earthy, it must mean matriarchal and feminine. Thus our instinctual body, whether in flesh or image, in men or women, in the past or now, belongs to her, and we must become murderous heroes to get it back. The great-mother complex hangs the trinket of female gender on agriculture and fertility, as well as on the earth, body, instinct, and on depth. This move ignores that chthonic is an epithet belonging in the sense of “Is ignorant about,” a chthon that cannot be identified with instinctual body or earthy soil.Let us be clear: the chthonic is not only female, not only instinctual, not only physical, and it does not have to do with fertility rites. As Wilamowitz-Moellendorf said, Ïf modern scholars, who talk so much about chthonian cults, think in this connection of agriculture and all that goes along with Demeter in that sphere, they have not accustomed their ear to the overtones of Greek words.” The two words ge and chthon imply two worlds, the first of the earth and in it, the second below the earth and beyond it.There are even three distinctions here which have been imagined as levels of earth: an earthed imagination in keeping with Ge herself, whose name we still find in ge-ography, ge-ology, and ge-ometry. The first of these distinctions is between Demeter’s horizontal green plain with its activities of growth and Ge, the earth below Demeter. This second level Ge, may be imagined as the physical and psychic ground of an individual or community, its ‘place on earth,’ with its natural rights, rituals, and laws (Ge-Themis). Here, Ge serves as a fundament on which human life depends even more deeply than on food and fertility, like a governing maternal principle that makes material fertility possible and is its spiritual ground, and then beneath these the third, chthon, the depths, the dead’s world.Of course, a polytheistic mind does not firmly divide these “levels,” and so Demeter-Ge-chthon frequently merge in epithet and cult. (What scholars imagine about the Greeks does not correspond, nor must it, with what the Greeks imagine about the Gods.) Also against my distinctions is the fact that one can as well view the entire complex of the underworld that one can as well view the entire complex of the underworld from the perspective of Ge, as does Patricia Berry. She then is able to see much of the chthonic spirit that I meet in Hades to be equally present in Ge, and that Gaia (Ge) is both material, maternal earth, and chthonic void with its own spirit.The question here partly turns on how one regards earth. The strata of meanings which I have just laid out in terms of Demeter-Ge-chthon imagines a nonphysical earth or terre pur, below or beyond and maybe prior to the ground that we touch. Some etymologists and classicists try to relate the three “levels” culturally, believing one level of meaning to be prior in the sense of historically earlier than another; as if in a genealogy fantasy themselves, they try to derive one level from another, tracing the historical development of these three concepts. For example, Kirk refers to the very early pre-Socratic Pherecydes of Syros (frg. 1), who placed Chthon at the beginning with Zeus and Chronos, “but Chthonie acquired the name Ge…”Rather than enter the arguments of historical fantasy, I would keep to the psychological distinctions reflected in the three words and three personifications. Ge herself shows two aspects. On the one hand, she has to do with retributive justice, with the Fates, and she has also mantic, oracular powers. (Ge chthonia was worshipped on Mykonos, together with Zeus Chthonios and Dionysos Leneus, as she was linked with the chthonic Pluto and Hermes and the Erinyes at Athens [Areopagus].) This is the “great lady” who sends the black-winged dreams and is appropriately the mother of Themis (“Justice”). This spiritual side of her can be distinguished, on the other hand, from the physical Ge to whom grains and fruits were given (Ge-Demeter). Demeter too has a mystery aspect; her daughter Persephone belongs to Hades and has an underworld function. The spiritual significance may not be reduced to the physical (death cult to fertility rites, sense of justice to agricultural rituals) without ignoring the blatant fact that there are different figures with different epithets. In other words, even the earth and nature have their psychic function as well as their terrestrial ones, and one may serve the earth and be on the ground in more ways than one, i.e., through psychic activities, and not only through natural ones.“Is it the transition to light that gives the dream its shadowy quality? We all know how much of an art it is, not to dream, but to recall it.”The distinction between chthonicand earthy, between invisible fundaments and tangible ground, between darkness of soul and blackness of soil, between three Egyptian hieroglyphs, one for earth, another for Aker or entrance to the underground at the edge of existence, and yet another for the realm of the dead of Anubis, the blue-black jackal-dog.Once again, the distinctions are presented in terms of distance. The most radical classicist of the late nineteenth century, Erwin Rohde friend of Nietzsche, said in his great work Psyche that the underworld of Hades and Persephone is so remote from our world that those removed there “can have no influence upon the life and doings of men on earth.”He further emphasized the distinction between the underground of Ge and the chthonic underworld by saying that Ge ïn actual worship was seldom found among the groups of male and female deities of a chthonic nature such as were worshipped together at many places.”The spiritual quality of the underworld stands forth most clearly in descriptions of Tartaros, which, from Hesiod onward, was imagined to be at the very bottom of Hades, its farthest chasm. Tartaros was compared with the sky – as distant from the earth as the heaven above, and it was personified as the son of ether and of earth, that is, a realm of dust, a composite of the most material and immaterial. As the fantasy of Tartaros developed, it became more and more a pneumatic region of air and wind. Unlike the Christian hell of fire, in the imagination of late antiquity Tartaros was a region of dense cold air without light. Hence, Hades often was spoken of as having wings, just as in the Gilgamesh Epic, Enkidu dreams of his death as a transformation into a bird, his arms covered with feathers. The dead are clad like birds, their element evidently air.The volatilization of the underworld contrasts it sharply with the ground under our feet. In the Alexandrian age, the netherworld lost its localization in the earth altogether – that is, it became free of natural literalism – and was geographically transposed to the underside of the world. There was now a lower hemisphere. The word subterranean (hypogeios, or “below ge”) referred to the whole celestial hemisphere curved below our earth and which, like Hades, must necessarily be invisible from our perspective. It cannot be seen from our usual standpoint. Already then the dayworld and the nightworld, the two sides of the romantic soul, were conceived in a geographical theology of the upperworld and netherworld.In “this theology the world is divided into two halves by the line of the horizon; upper hemisphere is the domain of the living and the higher gods, the lower that of the dead and the infernal gods. “The Egyptians had carried into extreme detail this reversed world below our feet. The dead walked upside down, feet up, heads down. “People there walk with their feet against the ceiling. This has the unpleasant consequence that digestion goes in the reverse direction, so that excrements arrive in the mouth.” The Underworld is converse to the dayworld, and so its behavior will be obverse, perverse. What is merely shit from the daytime perspective – or what Freud called day-residues – becomes soul food when turned upside down. The way we go about there, the way we ruminate, even logic is stood on its head, for there our heads are in another place. (In Chapter 6 we shall look at some contemporary examples of this “upsidedownness,” including excrements in dreams.)Might there be an archetypal figure within Freud’s “day residues” that are the material of the dream? Could these leftover scraps refer to the household garbage that was sacrifice to Hekate (Cults2:515)? Hekate has long been implicated in dream interpretations. Both the magical view that considers dreams to be foretellings and the nineteenth-century mechanistic view that attributes them to waste products of physiological sensations (garbage) show Hekate’s influence when she becomes equated with Nyx (night), as in Spenser and at times in Shakespeare, then dreams become her province and our interpretative ideas reflect her perspectives.We may continue this tradition, although in a different manner. Yes, the dream is made of scraps that belong to the Goddess who makes sacred the waste of life, so that it all counts, it all matters. Offering the dream to “the mysteries of Hekate and the night” (King Lear, act 1, scene 1) means giving back the regurgitations that “come up” in dreams without attempts to save them morally or to find their dayworld use. The junk of the soul is primordially saved by Hekate’s blessing, and even our trashing ourselves can be led back to her. The messy life is a way of entering her domain and becoming a “child of Hekate.”Our part is only to recognize that there is a myth in the mess so as to dispose of the day residues at the proper place, that is, to place them at Hekate’s altar. Ritually, the garbage was placed at night at a crossroads so that each dream may lead off in at least three directions besides the one we have come from. Hekate, who has traditionally been represented with three heads, keeps us looking and listening in many ways at once.Because the underworld differs so radically from the underground, that which has its home there, dreams, must refer to psychic or pneumatic world of ghosts, spirits, ancestors, souls, daimones. These are invisible by nature, and not merely invisible because they have been forgotten or repressed. This world is fluid, or dusty, fiery, muddy, or aetherial, so there is nothing firm to hold to – unless we develop intuitive instruments for seizing impalpables that slip through our fingers or burn at the touch.By locating the dream among these impalpable fundamentals in Hades, we will begin to find that dreams reflect an underworld of essences rather than an underground of root and seed. They present images of being rather than of becoming. We will learn that a dream is less a comment on life and an indication as to where it is growing, than it is a statement from the chthonic depths, the cold, dense, unchanging state – what we so often today call psychopathic because, as Freud saw, the dream does not show morality, human feelings, or the sense of time. We can no longer turn to the dream in hopes of progress, transformation, and rebirth.I think too that the underworld teaches us to abandon our hopes for achieving unification of personality by means of the dream. The underworld spirits are plural. So much is this the case that the di manes (underworld spirits), who were the Roman equivalent of the Greek theoi chthonioi, have no native singular form. Even individual dead persons were spoken of plurally, as di manes. “The ancient Egyptian was thought to live after death in a multiplicity of forms, each of these forms was the full man himself”(Ba, p. 113). The underworld is an innumerable community of figures. The endless variety of figures reflects the endlessness of the soul, and dreams restore to consciousness this sense of multiplicity. The polytheistic perspective is grounded in the chthonic depths of the soul. A psychotherapeutic emphasis will be upon the disintegrative effects of the dream, which also confronts us with our moral dis-integrity, our psychopathic lack of a central hold on ourselves. Dreams show us to be plural and that each of the forms that figure there are “the full man himself,” full potentials of behavior. Only by falling apart (RP, pp. 53-112) into the multiple figures do we extend consciousness to embrace and contain its psychopathic potentials.We get into difficulties when we try to read the deep chthonic level from the viewpoints of Demeter or of Ge. To perceive the chthonic with Demeter’s eyes is to take the dream as signal for literal action and to translate it with naturalistic ethics into a moralized world. To take a dream as containing an immoral implication or a moral indication for setting matters right and redressing a balance is to read it from the Ge-Themis-Dike perspective. Perhaps we need the intervention of another lady of the underworld, Hekate, who was especially adept with ghosts, who both brought and banned fear, and who had nothing to do with the round of human life (marriage, birth, agriculture), herself without brother or sister or any descendants. “Her worship was without morality.” Hekate’s underworld perspective reaches to the chthonic depth of the dream, which, on the one hand, is a simple statement of essence – how spectral things look when stripped of their human context – and, on the other, elicits our psychopathy. The region of the soul in which dreams have their home is deeper than flesh-and-blood urges, which we have been, mistakenly, calling chthonic, as if it were the same as natural, as if the underworld referred to ira and cupiditas, the blood-soul, the thymos. This all is earthy; the natural, physical, somatic soul of emotions. Our modern word unconscious has become a catch-all, collecting into one clouded reservoir all fantasies of the deep, the lower, the baser, the heavier (depressed), and the darker. We have buried in the same monolithic tomb called The Unconscious the red and earthy body of the primeval Adam, the collective common man and woman, and the shades, phantoms, and ancestors. We cannot distinguish a compulsion from a call, an instinct for an image, a desirous demand from a movement of imagination. Looking into the night from the while light of the dayworld (where the term unconscious was fashioned), we cannot tell the red from the black. So, we read dreams for all sorts of messages at once – somatic, personal, psychic, mantic, ancestral, practical, confusing instinctual and emotional life with the realm of death. The pronounced distinction between emotion and soul, between emotional man and psychological man, comes out in another of Heraclitus’ fragments (85): “. . . whatever it [thymos] wishes it buys at the price of soul.” Thymos, the earlier Greek experience of emotional consciousness or moist soul, did not belong in the underworld. So, to consider the dream as an emotional wish costs soul; to mistake the chthonic as the natural loses psyche. We cannot claim to be psychological when we read dream image in terms of drives or desires. Whatever counsel an analyst gives about emotional life, supposing it drawn from dreams, refers to his experience, which he reflects from the dreams. It is not in the dreams. He is “sup-posing” about them, that is, he is “putting onto” them what he knows about life. What one knows about life may not be relevant for what is below life. What one knows and has done in life may be as irrelevant to the underworld as clothes that adjust us to life and the flesh and bones that the clothes cover. For in the underworld all is stripped away, and life is upside down. We are further than the expectations based on life experience, and the wisdom derived from it. Again, we can follow Heraclitus (frg. 27): “When men die there awaits what they neither expect nor even imagine.” The word translated here as “expect” is related in Greek to “hope” (elpis), so that the specific hope that is abandoned (Dante, Inferno 3) on entering the underworld perspective is the fantasy of daylife expectations and flesh-and-blood illusions. Souls in Hades are “incurable” said Plato. There is no alteration to be hoped for. Such hope would be hope for the wrong thing. We need more the hope of St. Paul, which is a hope of invisibles and for invisibles, than the hope of Pandora, who, as the wife of Prometheus, contains a hidden hope, which he makes evident in his mission to help mankind. To go deep into a dream requires abandoning hope, the hope that rises in the morning and would turn the dream to its purposes. At the Hades level of the dream there is neither hope nor despair. They cancel each other out; and we can move beyond the language of expectations, measuring progressions and regressions, ego strengthening and weakening, coping and failing.Let me once more try to draw this distinction between the underground of vital, emotional life and the underworld Heraclitus said (frg. 15): It it were not in honour of Dionysus that they conducted the procession and sang the hymn to the male organ, their activity would be completely shameless. Hades and Dionysus are the same, no matter how much they go mad and rave celebrating bacchic rites in honour of the latter. The passage has given scholars – those who accept this phrasing at all – so much trouble partly because it juxtaposes, even identifies, the very different realms we are keeping distinct: psychic essences and emotional nature.This fragment refers to the mystery of a sacred procession and it must be read with a similar reverence, even as a revelation of something profound in acts that seem shamelessly pornographic, raving, and mad. It is therefore not enough to pass it off with a moral generality, as some interpreters do, that Heraclitus means that even the wildest life forces also lead to death, or let it go by, as other interprets do, as another of his metaphysical generalities about the sameness of life and death (frgs. 62, 88). We are still left with the vivid imagery of this mystery in the sexual language that is so fundamental to psychology. So, Heraclitus, as one psychologist to another, across the centuries I read you to be saying that for this troublesome distinction between emotion and soul, between the perspective of vitality (Dionysos) and the perspective of psyche (Hades), sexual fantasy holds a secret. In what seems most evident, public, and concrete, there is also something covered in shame, hidden and invisible.The Hades within Dionysus says that there is an invisible meaning in sexual acts, a significance for soul in the phallic parade, that all our life force, including the polymorphous and pornographic desires of the psyche, refer to the underworld of images. Things in life, no matter how full of life, are not only natural. Dionysos is also a “downer.” We may believe we are living life only on the level of life, but we cannot escape the psychic significance of what we are doing. Soul is made in the rout of the world. What has meaning for life has meaning for soul at the same moment, so consider you living in the light of the Hades within it.The other side of the mysterious identity, the Dionysos within Hades, says that there is zoe, a vitality in all underworld phenomena. The realm of the dead is not as dead as we expect it. Hades too can rape and also seize the psyche through sexual fantasies. Although without thymos, body, or voice, there is a hidden libido in the shadows. The images in Hades are also Dionysian – not fertile in the natural sense, but in the psychic sense, imaginatively fertile. There is an imagination below the earth that abounds in animal forms, that revels and makes music. There is a dance in death. Hades and Dionysos are the same. As Hades darkens Dionysos toward his own richness. Farnell describes their fusion as a “mildness joined with melancholy.”
DREAMTIME Hostel of Medicated Girls April 20, 2005
I am going away for a trip but it seems like a Mission I am on….and I am packed lightly and in such a way that it seems I am ‘roughing it’. I end up at this place like a hostel….I go around the back….there is a wee boy planting stuff in a big Garden. I am watching him, when two men come out. One of the men reminds me of Lemmy from Motorhead. The men tell the boy that he has planted too many plants, too close together. But I am walking through the garden and I think he has done a great job. There is loads of cabbage and green leafy veg….and most of it is already tall and blooming. Some are still ripening. I am talking to the two men then and they are giving me advice about the ‘Hostel’. I am also asking them about the Garden. I see Fennel and am asking the men if that is what it is, they say ‘Yes, it is very good for you’. I say ‘I love Fennel’. I am thinking the whole time that they are very Down-To-Earth guys and wonder how they ended up here…..in a wee hostel….planting a beautiful Garden.
There is a fence on the side of the Garden…..and when I look over past it I see that there are many different Gardens all in separate enclosures. I think to myself it is great that the Hostel has room for Gardens and wonder if the 2 men work in all of them, or just this one. At this point I am laying in the garden and have a blanket over me…….still talking to the men, one on each side of me. The ‘Lemmy’ man seems upset about something and reaches into one of the other Gardens, through a hole in the fence, and pulls out a large Golden Coin, and gives it to me, to use at the Hostel. I thank him. We are out there for quite some time, in the lush Gardens. At some point I see a small growing plant and as what it is…..one of the men says something….then says ‘no, that’s just a weed’. I leave the plant though, not wanting to pull it. As I lift the blanket up, I realize that in the process I have bent over two different plants…..A Flower, and some kind of Vegetable. I prop the Flower up so that it will heal, and stick the broken stem of the vegetable back into the mound of plants so it will re-root. I feel bad for messing them up. I say goodbye to the men, and leave to check in to the Hostel.
On the outside of the Hostel I see a bunch of numbered doors…..in sections. I seem to have been given a certain key/section and am trying to find it. There is a sign on a door that says SISTERHOOD/BROTHERHOOD….and I go inside and see an area where secondhand clothes are hanging and for sale. I go to the counter to check in, etc. There are Girls everywhere. They all seem to be ‘outcasts’ in some way. It almost feels like I am in some kind of ‘crazy house’. But I check in anyway, and decide only to check in for a total of 3 Days….I don’t know how long it will take me to accomplish my Mission, and I do not want to pay for more time Here than I need to stay. I am speaking with the woman at the desk for awhile and sorting it all out....the payment etc. All the girls seem to be watching me. It ends up costing 25Pound (GBP)…and I hand her green Dollar Bills(USD) and they are all out of order…?...this does not seem to be acceptable payment. Then I remember the Gold coin that I was given in the Garden, and I hand it to the woman….it is worth exactly 25Pound. Its very heavy and a bright Gold….She is happy to get the coin, and I take back the dollars. She gives me a room number.
I am then with all the girls, and they are very loud and rowdy and it seems that almost all of them are there against their Will. I ask for a toilet and accidentally go into the Mens room….decide to try and pee anyway…but an older man who is kind of spooky and weird comes in and gets really close to me….so I run out and find the girls bathroom. There are a few toilets out in the open. I have already defecated and now need to take a piss……and I see some toilets that are actually enclosed so I make my way to them instead of the others. The bathroom is not very clean. I go into one stall that has a drain in the floor….and a sign that says ‘ONLY HOT WATER DOWN DRAIN’….I decide that pee is quite warm and so I squat and am going to pee….the door to the stall is half open….and the stall is very large. A girl peeks under the door to see if the stall is occupied….then leaves. Then another girl closes my stall door so that no one can see inside. I am still squatting above the drain trying to pee. The girls all seem very curious about me.
Next thing I know I am making friends with a couple of the girls. Then we all get on a big bus, to go on some kind of group Trip….I am asking someone something about Warrenton….I think that I see my highschool boyfriend JD on the bus, but realize it is not him, the person is too small to be him. A girl who looks like Jennifer Ellison (actress) comes and sits down on my seat next to me. She is trying to be really tough. I have a rolled up picture/artwork in my hand….the picture that I drew for Mickey D…..and she grabs it and throws it out the open bus window…….but it comes right back in and lands in my hand. She is amazed. I say to her something about ENERGY….that I have the Healing Power….and that she cannot hope to do anything Negative to me. She is then intrigued and sits and listens….and like all the other girls has decided to be my friend. We stop at the destination which is another large Hostel-type building…. All the girls here are treated quite badly I have learned and it is more or less a crazyhouse. I decide I have to help them. The staff are friendly but manipulative. The girls are forced to take medications etc. We are all in a locker room….and the staff come in with all this Halloween Candy…..handing it out to the girls. I have the definite awareness/knowing that the candy is Medicated, and I have told the girls beforehand all about it….and that the reason they all think they are crazy is because they have been Fed that crap, and since the staff themselves are Unmedicated….they perceive all the girls to be Abnormal/Crazy because of the state they are in due to the consumption of the drugs/medications that are hidden in the candy. But now the Girls are ready to turn the tables….while the staff are handing out the meds/candy….I myself am accepting it too but sneaking a piece each in their back pockets(of the staff)….mostly tootsie rolls….somehow that means that they will find it later and end up consuming it themselves…..swallowing their own medicine. I say ‘let them see how it feels’. Then I still have a handful of candy and a staff member says something to the effect that it comes out of my room payment…or is added on to my bill??...I say ‘I thought it was free….a Gift?’….she says NO, it is not…and I throw the candy across the floor and say I do not want it. Then all the other girls Rebel too. They seem to be gaining confidence. I am happy about what I am doing. It seems that I am getting close to my Destination/where I was headed though and ready to check out………as it turns out I was the only one there who was there voluntarily.
🌟But the moment we realize body also as a subtle body–a fantasy system of complexes, symptoms, tastes, influences and relations, zones of delight, pathologized images, trapped insights–then body and soul lose their borders, neither more literal or metaphorical than the other. Remember: the enemy is the literal, and the literal is not the concrete flesh but negligence of the vision that concrete flesh is a magnificent citadel of metaphors.
Putting soul inside man also neglects that man, too, is a personified literalism- no more an actual real container than soul. In Chapter 1 the realization grew that a human life is actually a personification of the soul, a projection of it, contained by it. Although we readily accept the notion that human energy, and nature, life, and Gods are not specifically human privileges and that they exist “‘outside” human be- ings, we curiously balk over distinguishing soul from human being. Is this because we do not allow anima her independence? Is this the fundamental intolerance of human psychology: its inability to admit the distinct reality, the full reality, of soul, so that all our human struggle with imagination and its mad incursions, with the symptoms of com- plexes, with ideologies, theologies, and their systems, are in root and essence the unpredictable writhing movements of Psyche freeing herself from human imprisonment?
Our distinction between psyche and human has several important consequences. If we conceive each human being to be defined individually and differently by the soul, and we admit that the soul exists independently of human beings, then our essentially differing human individuality is really not human at all, but more the gift of an inhuman daimon who demands human service. It is not my individuation, but the daimon’s; not my fate that matters to the Gods, but how I care for the psychic persons entrusted to my stewardship during my life. It is not life that matters, but soul and how life is used to care for soul. This bears upon dreams. Dreams, we said earlier, are the best model of the actual psyche, for they show it personified, pathologized, and manifold. In them the ego is only one figure among many psychic persons. Nothing is literal; all is metaphor. Dreams are the best model also because they show the soul apart from life, reflecting it but just as often unconcerned with the life of the human being who dreams them. Their main concern seems not to be with living but with imagining.”
The pathologized images have moved the soul in several ways: we are afraid; we feel vulnerable and in danger; our very physical substance and sanity appear to be menaced; we want to prevent or rectify. Especially this last seizes us. We feel protective, impelled to correct, straighten, repair. For we have confused something sick with something wrong. […] affliction reaches us partly through the guilt it brings. Guilt belongs to the experiences of deviation, the the sense of being off, failing, ‘missing the mark’. […] However the true missing of the mark is taking the guilt literally, where failings becomes faults to be set right. This places the guilt on the shoulders of the ego who ‘should not’ have failed. Then pathologizing reinforces the ego’s style and guilt serves a secondary gain, increasing the ego’s sense of importance: ego becomes superego, drivenly busy with repairing wrongs. A guilty ego is no less egocentric than a proud one.
James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology
{self Portrait series part 3 : 8-6-24}
“The poeisis of space In this chaotic time Of birth” ~Charleen Johnston
What door is opened into soul through our wounds.
James HillmanThe cure of the shadow is on the one hand a moral problem, that is, recognition of what we have repressed, how we perform our repressions, how we rationalize and deceive ourselves, what sort of goals we have and what we have hurt, even maimed, in the name of these goals. On the other hand, the cure of the shadow is a problem of love. How far can our love extend to the broken and ruined parts of ourselves, the disgusting and perverse? How much charity and compassion have we for our own weakness and sickness?… Loving oneself is no easy matter just because it means loving all of oneself, including the shadow where one is inferior and socially so unacceptable. The care one gives this humiliating part is also the cure. More: as the cure depends on care, so does caring sometimes mean nothing more than carrying.
James Hillman, Meeting the Shadow: The Hidden Power of the Dark Side of Human NatureFor any one of us, child or adult, the question eclipsing all others is: How does what comes with you to the world find a place in the world? How does my meaning fit with the meanings to which I am asked to conform? What helps growing down?
James Hillman, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and CallingThere is more in a human life than our theories of it allow. Sooner or later something seems to call us onto a particular path. You may remember this “something” as a signal moment in childhood when an urge out of nowhere, a fascination, a peculiar turn of events struck like an annunciation: This is what I must do, this is what I’ve got to have. This is who I am.
James Hillman, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and CallingBut our task here is not to restore all the invisibles but to discriminate among them by attending to the one that once was called your daimon or genius, sometimes your soul or your fate, and now your acorn.
James Hillman, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and CallingAttention does for consciousness what our hands do for our bodies: it grabs hold of nature so that we can change it.
James Hillman, Alchemical Psychology: Uniform Edition of the Writings of James Hillman, Vol. 5For the daimon surprises. It crosses my intentions with its interventions, sometimes with a little twinge of hesitation, sometimes with a quick crush on someone or something. These surprises feel small and irrational; you can brush them aside; yet they also convey a sense of importance, which can make you say afterward: “Fate.
James HillmanIdeas that we do not know we have have us. And then they shape our experiences from behind, unbeknown. Psychology’s job, it seems to me, is to see the subjective, archetypal factor in our sight, before or while looking at facts and events. Other sciences have to pretend to being objective, to be describing things as they are; psychology fortunately is always bound by its psychic limitations and can be spared the pretense of objectivity. In place of the obligation to be objectively factual, it is obliged to be subjectively aware, which becomes possible only if we are willing to have an exhaustive go at the assumptions in our primary notions.
James Hillman, Anima: Anatomy of a Personified NotionThere is more in a human life than our theories of it allow.
James Hillman, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling“The work of soul–making is concerned essentially with the evocation of psychological faith, the faith arising from the psyche which shows as faith in the reality of the soul… Psychological faith begins in the love of images, and it flows mainly through the shapes of persons in reveries, fantasies, reflections, and imaginations. Their increasing vivification gives one an increasing conviction of having, and then of being, an interior reality of deep significance transcending one’s personal life….”
James HillmanPsychological faith is reflected in an ego that gives credit to images and turns to them in its darkness. Its trust is in the imagination as the only uncontrovertible reality, directly presented, immediately felt.
James HillmanSoul making, as work on anima through images, offers a way of resolving the dependencies of transference. For it is not the therapist or any actual person whatever who is the keeper of my soul beyond all betrayals, but the archetypal persons of the Gods to whom the anima acts as bridge. The shaping of her amorphous moods, sulfuric passions, bitter resentments, and bubbles of distraction into distinct personalities is the main work of therapeutic analysis or soul-making. Therefore, it works in imagination, with imagination, and for imagination. It discovers and forms a personality by disclosing and shaping the multiple soul personalities out of the primary massa confusa of arguing voices and pushing demands.
From Hillman, James, Re-Visioning Psychology, p. 50This is what I must do, this is what I’ve got to have. This is who I am.
James Hillman, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling…you find your genius by looking in the mirror of your life. Your visible image shows your inner truth, so when you’re estimating others, what you see is what you get. It therefore becomes critically important to see generously, or you will get only what you see; to see sharply, so that you discern the mix of traits rather than a generalized lump; and to see deeply into dark shadows, or else you will be deceived.
James Hillman, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and CallingAnytime you’re gonna grow, you’re gonna lose something. You’re losing what you’re hanging onto to keep safe. You’re losing habits that you’re comfortable with, you’re losing familiarity.
James HillmanI can no longer be sure whether the psyche is in me or whether I’m in the psyche…
James HillmanEach life is formed by its unique image, an image that is the essence of that life and calls it to a destiny. As the force of fate, this image acts as a personal daimon, an accompanying guide who remembers your calling.
James HillmanThe daimon motivates. It protects. It invents and persists with stubborn fidelity. It resists compromising reasonableness and often forces deviance and oddity upon its keeper, especially when neglected or opposed. It offers comfort and can pull you into its shell, but it cannot abide innocence. It can make the body ill. It is out of step with time, finding all sorts of faults, gaps, and knots in the flow of life – and it prefers them. It has affinities with myth, since it is itself a mythical being and thinks in mythical patterns.
James HillmanIt has much to do with feelings of uniqueness, of grandeur and with the restlessness of the heart, its impatience, its dissatisfaction, its yearning. It needs its share of beauty. It wants to be seen, witnessed, accorded recognition, particularly by the person who is its caretaker. Metaphoric images are its first unlearned language, which provides the poetic basis of mind, making possible communication between all people and all things by means of metaphors.
James HillmanExtraordinary people display calling most evidently…they are extraordinary because their calling comes through so clearly and they are so loyal to it. They serve as exemplars of calling and its strength, and also of keeping faith with its signals.
James HillmanFor centuries we have searched for the right term for this “call”. The Romans named it your ‘genius’; the Greeks, your ‘daimon’; and the Christians your guardian angel. The Romantics, like Keats, said the call came from the heart, and Michelangelo’s intuitive eye saw an image in the heart of the person he was sculpting. The Neoplatonists referred to an imaginal body, the ‘ochema’, that carried you like a vehicle. It was your personal bearer or support. For some it is Lady Luck or Fortuna; for others a genie or jinn, a bad seed or evil genius. In Egypt, it might have been the ‘ka’, or the ‘ba’ with whom you could converse. Among the people we refer to as Eskimos and others who follow shamanistic practices, it is your spirit, your free-soul, your animal-soul, your breath-soul.
James Hillman, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and CallingPerception bestows blessing—as the stories sketched in this chapter attempt to demonstrate. Perception brings into being and maintains the being of whatever is perceived; and when perception sees in “the holiness of the Heart’s affections,” again as these stories say, things are revealed that prove the Truth of the Imagination.
James Hillman, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and CallingAging is no accident. It is necessary to the human condition, intended by the soul. We become more characteristic of who we are simply by lasting into later years; the older we become, the more our true natures emerge. Thus the final years have a very important purpose: the fulfillment and confirmation of one’s character.
James HillmanTell me what you yearn for and I shall tell you who you are. We are what we reach for, the idealized image that drives our wandering.
James HillmanI like to imagine a person’s psyche to be like a boardinghouse full of characters. The ones who show up regularly and who habitually follow the house rules may not have met other long-term residents who stay behind closed doors, or who only appear at night. An adequate theory of character must make room for character actors, for the stuntmen and animal handlers, for all the figures who play bit parts and produce unexpected acts. They often make the show fateful, or tragic, or farcically absurd.
James HillmanLove alone is not enough. Without imagination, love stales into sentiment, duty, boredom. Relationships fail not because we have stopped loving but because we first stopped imagining.
James Hillman
Anything you attend to carefully can bring blessing.
James Hillman
An individual’s harmony with his or her ‘own deep self’ requires not merely a journey to the interior but a harmonizing with the environmental world.
James HillmanAn individual’s harmony with his or her ‘own deep self’ requires not merely a journey to the interior but a harmonizing with the environmental world.
🌟Rank asked why the artist so often avoids clinical neurosis when he is so much a candidate for it because of his vivid imagination, his openness to the finest and broadest aspects of experience, his isolation from the cultural world-view that satisfies everyone else. The answer is that he takes in the world, but instead of being oppressed by it he reworks it in his own personality and recreates it in the work of art. The neurotic is precisely the one who cannot create—the “artiste-manque,” as Rank so aptly called him. We might say that both the artist and the neurotic bite off more than they can chew, but the artist spews it back out again and chews it over in an objectified way, as an external, active, work project. The neurotic can’t marshal this creative response embodied in a specific work, and so he chokes on his introversions. The artist has similar large-scale introversions, but he uses them as material.🌟
:::🌟Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death
{Self Portrait Series 8-7-24 part 2}
The road to creativity passes so close to the madhouse and often detours or ends there. Ernest Becker, The Denial of DeathMan cannot endure his own littleness unless he can translate it into meaningfulness on the largest possible level.
Ernest Becker, The Denial of DeathThe irony of man’s condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation; but it is life itself which awakens it, and so we must shrink from being fully alive.
Ernest Becker, The Denial of DeathThe neurotic exhausts himself not only in self-preoccupations like hypochondrial fears and all sorts of fantasies, but also in others: those around him on whom he is dependent become his therapeutic work project; he takes out his subjective problems on them. But people are not clay to be molded; they have needs and counter-wills of their own. The neurotic’s frustration as a failed artist can’t be remedied by anything but an objective creative work of his own. Another way of looking at it is to say that the more totally one takes in the world as a problem, the more inferior or “bad” one is going to feel inside oneself. He can try to work out this “badness” by striving for perfection, and then the neurotic symptom becomes his “creative” work; or he can try to make himself perfect by means his partner. But it is obvious to us that the only way to work on perfection is in the form of an objective work that is fully under your control and is perfectible in some real ways. Either you eat up yourself and others around you, trying for perfection; or you objectify that imperfection in a work, on which you then unleash your creative powers. In this sense, some kind of objective creativity is the only answer man has to the problem of life. In this way he satisfies nature, which asks that he live and act objectively as a vital animal plunging into the world; but he also satisfies his own distinctive human nature because he plunges in on his own symbolic terms and not as a reflex of the world as given to mere physical sense experience. He takes in the world, makes a total problem out of it, and then gives out a fashioned, human answer to that problem. This, as Goethe saw in Faust, is the highest that man can achieve.
Ernest Becker, The Denial of DeathIn Jung’s terms-that we noted previously-the work is the artist’s own transference projection, and he knows that consciously and critically. Whatever he does he is stuck with himself, can’t get securely outside and beyond himself. He is also stuck with the work of art itself. Like any material achievement it is visible, earthly, impermanent. No matter how great it is, it still pales in some ways next to the transcending majesty of nature; and so it is ambiguous, hardly a solid immortality symbol. In his greatest genius man is still mocked. No matter that historically art and psychosis have had such an intimate relationship, that the road to creativity passes so close to the madhouse and often detours or ends there. The artist and the madman are trapped by their own fabrications; they wallow in their own anality, in their protest that they really are something special in creation.
Ernest Becker, The Denial of DeathThe most that any one of us can seem to do is to fashion something–an object or ourselves–and drop it into the confusion, make an offering of it, so to speak, to the life force.
Ernest Becker, The Denial of DeathGuilt results from unused life, from the unlived in us.
Ernest Becker, The Denial of DeathAnd so we see the paradox that evolution has handed us. If man is the only animal whose consciousness of self gives him an unusual dignity in the animal kingdom, he also pays a tragic price for it. The fact that the child has to identify -first- means that his very first identity is a social product. His habitation of his own body is built from the outside in; not from the inside out. He doesn’t unfold into the world, the world unfolds into him. As the child responds to the vocal symbols learned from his object, he often gives the pathetic impression of being a true social puppet, jerked by alien symbols and sounds. What sensitive parent does not have his satisfaction tinged with sadness as the child repeats with such vital earnestness the little symbols that are taught him?
Ernest Becker, The Birth and Death of Meaning: An Interdisciplinary Perspective on the Problem of ManMan cuts out for himself a manageable world: he throws himself into action uncritically, unthinkingly. He accepts the cultural programming that turns his nose where he is supposed to look; he doesn’t bite the world off in one piece as a giant would, but in small manageable pieces, as a beaver does. He uses all kinds of techniques, which we call the “character defenses”: he learns not to expose himself, not to stand out; he learns to embed himself in other-power, both of concrete persons and of things and cultural commands; the result is that he comes to exist in the imagined infallibility of the world around him. He doesn’t have to have fears when his feet are solidly mired and his life mapped out in a ready-made maze. All he has to do is to plunge ahead in a compulsive style of drivenness in the “ways of the world.
Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death[Man] literally drives himself into a blind obliviousness with social games, psychological tricks, personal preoccupations so far removed from the reality of his situation that they are forms of madness, but madness all the same.
Ernest Becker, The Denial of DeathTo grow up at all is to conceal the mass of internal scar tissue that throbs in our dreams.
Ernest Becker, The Denial of DeathBy the time the child grows up, the inverted search for a personal existence through perversity gets set in an individual mold, and it becomes more secret. It has to be secret because the community won’t stand for the attempt by people to wholly individualize themselves. If there is going to be a victory over human incompleteness and limitation, it has to be a social project and not an individual one. Society wants to be the one to decide how people are to transcend death; it will tolerate the causa-sui project only if it fits into the standard social project. Otherwise there is the alarm of “Anarchy!” This is one of the reasons for bigotry and censorship of all kinds over personal morality: people fear that the standard morality will be undermined-another way of saying that they fear they will no longer be able to control life and death. A person is said to be “socialized” precisely when he accepts to “sublimate” the body-sexual character of his Oedipal project. Now these euphemisms mean usually that he accepts to work on becoming the father of himself by abandoning his own project and by giving it over to “The Fathers.” The castration complex has done its work, and one submits to “social reality”; he can now deflate his own desires and claims and can play it safe in the world of the powerful elders. He can even give his body over to the tribe, the state, the embracing magic umbrella of the elders and their symbols; that way it will no longer be a dangerous negation for him. But there is no real difference between a childish impossibility and an adult one; the only thing that the person achieves is a practiced self-deceit-what we call the “mature” character.
Ernest Becker, The Denial of DeathThe ironic thing about the narrowing-down of neurosis is that the person seeks to avoid death, but he does it by killing off so much of himself and so large a spectrum of his action-world that he is actually isolating and diminishing himself and becomes as though dead. There is just no way for the living creature to avoid life and death, and it is probably poetic justice that if he tries too hard to do so he destroys himself.
Ernest Becker, The Denial of DeathKierkegaard gives us some portrait sketches of the styles of denying possibility, or the lies of character-which is the same thing. He is intent on describing what we today call “inauthentic” men, men who avoid developing their own uniqueness; they follow out the styles of automatic and uncritical living in which they were conditioned as children. They are “inauthentic” in that they do not belong to themselves, are not “their own” person, do not act from their own center, do not see reality on its terms; they are the one-dimensional men totally immersed in the fictional games being played in their society, unable to transcend their social conditioning: the corporation men in the West, the bureaucrats in the East, the tribal men locked up in tradition-man everywhere who doesn’t understand what it means to think for himself and who, if he did, would shrink back at the idea of such audacity and exposure.
Ernest Becker, The Denial of DeathAnthropologists have long known that when a tribe of people lose their feeling that their way of life is worth-while they may stop reproducing, or in large numbers simply lie down and die beside streams full of fish: food is not the primary nourishment of man.
Ernest Becker, The Birth and Death of Meaning: An Interdisciplinary Perspective on the Problem of ManBeyond a given point man is not helped by more “knowing,” but only by living and doing in a partly self-forgetful way. As Goethe put it, we must plunge into experience and then reflect on the meaning of it. All reflection and no plunging drives us mad; all plunging and no reflection, and we are brutes.
Ernest Becker, The Denial of DeathTake stock of those around you and you will … hear them talk in precise terms about themselves and their surroundings, which would seem to point to them having ideas on the matter. But start to analyse those ideas and you will find that they hardly reflect in any way the reality to which they appear to refer, and if you go deeper you will discover that there is not even an attempt to adjust the ideas to this reality. Quite the contrary: through these notions the individual is trying to cut off any personal vision of reality, of his own very life. For life is at the start a chaos in which one is lost. The individual suspects this, but he is frightened at finding himself face to face with this terrible reality, and tries to cover it over with a curtain of fantasy, where everything is clear. It does not worry him that his “ideas” are not true, he uses them as trenches for the defense of his existence, as scarecrows to frighten away reality.
Ernest Becker, The Denial of DeathThe man of knowledge in our time is bowed down under a burden he never imagined he would ever have: the overproduction of truth that cannot be consumed.
Ernest Becker, The Denial of DeathThere is no doubt that creative work is itself done under a compulsion often indistinguishable from a purely clinical obsession. In this sense, what we call a creative gift is merely the social license to be obsessed. And what we call “cultural routine” is a similar license: the proletariat demands the obsession of work in order to keep from going crazy. I used to wonder how people could stand the really demonic activity of working behind those hellish ranges in hotel kitchens, the frantic whirl of waiting on a dozen tables at one time, the madness of the travel agent’s office at the height of the tourist season, or the torture of working with a jack-hammer all day on a hot summer street. The answer is so simple that it eludes us: the craziness of these activities is exactly that of the human condition. They are “right” for us because the alternative is natural desperation. The daily madness of these jobs is a repeated vaccination against the madness of the asylum. Look at the joy and eagerness with which workers return from vacation to their compulsive routines. They plunge into their work with equanimity and lightheartedness because it drowns out something more ominous.
Ernest Becker, The Denial of DeathIn other words, as long as man is an ambiguous creature he can never banish anxiety; what he can do instead is to use anxiety as an eternal spring for growth into new dimensions of thought and trust. Faith poses a new life task, the adventure in openness to a multi-dimensional reality.
Ernest Becker, The Denial of DeathPeople create the reality they need in order to discover themselves.
Ernest Becker, The Denial of DeathThe “healthy” person, the true individual, the self-realized soul, the “real” man, is the one who has transcended himself.
Ernest Becker, The Denial of DeathThe great boon of repression is that it makes it possible to live decisively in an overwhelmingly miraculous and incomprehensible world, a world so full of beauty, majesty, and terror that if animals perceived it all they would be paralyzed to act. … What would the average man (sic) do with a full consciousness of absurdity? He has fashioned his character for the precise purpose of putting it between himself and the facts of life; it is his special tour-de-force that allows him to ignore incongruities, to nourish himself on impossibilities, to thrive on blindness. He accomplishes thereby a peculiarly human victory: the ability to be smug about terror.
Ernest Becker, The Denial of DeathTake the average man who has to stage in his own way the life drama of his own worth and significance. As a youth he, like everyone else, feels that deep down he has a special talent, an indefinable but real something to contribute to the richness and success of life in the universe. But, like almost everyone else, he doesn’t seem to hit on the unfolding of this special something; his life takes on the character of a series of accidents and encounters that carry him along, willy-nilly, into new experiences and responsibilities. Career, marriage, family, approaching old age – all these happen to him, he doesn’t command them. Instead of his staging the drama of his own significance, he himself is staged, programmed by the standard scenario laid down by his society.
Ernest Becker, Angel in Armor: A Post-Freudian Perspective on the Nature of ManSecrets and silences make life more real: the individual, self-absorbed and inwardly musing, taking himself very seriously, radiates a contagious aura: the tacit communication that the serious and the meaningful exist.
Ernest Becker, The Birth and Death of Meaning: An Interdisciplinary Perspective on the Problem of ManKierkegaard put it this way: But while one sort of despair plunges wildly into the infinite and loses itself, a second sort permits itself as it were to be defrauded by “the others.” By seeing the multitude of men about it, by getting engaged in all sorts of wordly affairs, by becoming wise about how things go in this world, such a man forgets himself… does not dare to believe in himself, finds it too venturesome a thing to be himself, far easier and safer to be like the others, to become an imitation, a number, a cipher in the crowd.
Ernest Becker, The Denial of DeathWe fear our highest possibility (as well as our lowest ones). We are generally afraid to become that which we can glimpse in our most perfect moments…. We enjoy and even thrill to the godlike possibilities we see in ourselves in such peak moments. And yet we simultaneously shiver with weakness, awe and fear before these very same possibilities.
🌟🌟🌟 “Creativity is divine! To me it is the virgin soul opening to spirit and creating the divine child. You cannot live without it. That’s the meaning of life, that creative fire………::”
“::….. My soul is fed. I see, I smell, I taste, I hear, I touch. Through the orifices of my body, I give and I receive. I am not trying to capture what is absent. It’s that interchange between the embodied soul and the outside world that is the dynamic process. That’s how growth takes place. That is life.”🌟🌟🌟
Marion Woodman
{self Portrait series at Kennedy peak 8-6-24}
This is your body, your greatest gift, pregnant with wisdom you do not hear, grief you thought was forgotten, and joy you have never known. Marion WoodmanTo me, real love, the move from power to love, involves immense suffering. Any creative work comes from that level, where we share our sufferings, just the sheer suffering of being human. And that’s where the real love is. Marion WoodmanWhen the power comes from within us and we claim it as our own, then we no longer have to affirm ourselves by dominating others. The irony is that we are actually afraid of our own power.
Marion Woodman, Dancing in the Flames: The Dark Goddess in the Transformation of ConsciousnessOnly by discovering and loving the goddess lost within our rejected body can we hear our own authentic voice.
Marion Woodman, Coming Home to Myself: Reflections for Nurturing a Woman’s Body and SoulI yearned for lightness; I still yearn for lightness. Lightness is freedom — freedom from the heaviness of too much stuff, too many words, too heavy a pull toward inertia. I feared being buried in stone — becoming stone.
Marion Woodman, Bone: Dying into LifeKill the imagination and you kill the soul. Kill the soul and you’re left with a listless, apathetic creature who can become hopeless or brutal or both.
Marion Woodman, Bone: Dying into LifeIn our yearning to be perfect, we have mistaken perfection for wholeness. We think we cannot love ourselves until we and others meet some external standard. Depression, anxiety—in fact, most neuroses and compulsions—are ultimately a defense against loving ourselves without condition. We are afraid to look at the damp, dark, ugly yet exquisite roots of being that stretch deep into our survival chakra. We are fearful of finding that the spirit is not there, that our Home is empty, even as our outer home is empty. Yet it is in that place of survival, where the dark mother has been abandoned, that spirit longs to be embodied so that the whole body may become light. Ego wants to be the god of our own idealized projection; spirit wants to be incarnated in our humanity where it can grow in wisdom through experience.
Marion Woodman, Dancing in the Flames: The Dark Goddess in the Transformation of ConsciousnessThe Goddess is the unspeakable wisdom that grows into the very cells of the body. She lives with this sacramental truth at her center: the beauty and the horror of the whole of life are blazing in Her love. She is dancing in the flames.
Marion Woodman, Dancing in the Flames: The Dark Goddess in the Transformation of ConsciousnessIn the story of Persephone and Hades there is a child. Hades abducts Persephone and takes her into the Underworld, where in some versions of the myth she has a child. In many of the myths, Leda and the swan, Danae and the shower of gold, for example, the human woman is impregnated by the god. In other words, matter is penetrated by spirit and the child of the union of matter and spirit is the divine child.
Marion WoodmanYou think of yourself — light, fast, free — free of earth, free of bondage to your body. In your ‘perfect’ body, you are in control, addicted to the light that keeps you out of body. You’re a swan maiden, addicted to wings, addicted to spirit. You refused to eat in order to fly.
Marion Woodman, Bone: Dying into LifeThe solid line throughout was my trying to make space to fly and forever smashing my wings against the bars of the cage. Granted, the cage grew bigger and very big, but I was always beyond the collective in my soul and always cut back by the collective in my body.
Marion Woodman, Bone: Dying into LifeThe word ‘feminine,’ as I understand it, has very little to do with gender, nor is woman the custodian of femininity. Both men and women are searching for their pregnant virgin. She is the part of us who is outcast, the part who comes to consciousness through going into darkness, mining our leaden darkness, until we bring her silver out.
Marion Woodman, The Pregnant Virgin: A Process of Psychological TransformationWhy put them through the danger of the fire? And then, I heard, as though it spoke, the voice of the guardian-head: “Each piece must go through the fire. The cowl, the wings, the pneuma, the source, the flow. All must go the way that I have gone. Each may crack in the process, as I have cracked. But look, the crack has healed. I did not break. Without the fire, the piece is untested, unlived, raw. Each must go through the fire.
Marion Woodman, Leaving My Father’s House: A Journey to Conscious FemininityKundalini power, the symbol of raising the energy coiled at the base of the spine upward through the chakras, is called by Sri Chinmoy, ‘the power of the Supreme Goddess.’ Repressed or coiled in a circle, she can be poisonous both to the body and the psyche, but once risen and standing upright, she is beneficent. The power of the serpent, rightly understood, is one of the ways the Goddess overcomes duality.
Marion Woodman, Dancing in the Flames: The Dark Goddess in the Transformation of ConsciousnessSo long as she is obedient to a mother—actual or internal—who unconsciously wishes to annihilate her, she is in a state of possession by the witch; she will have to differentiate herself out from that witch in order to live her own life.
Marion Woodman, Addiction to Perfection: The Still Unravished Bride: A Psychological StudyThe way to healing an addiction lies in finding a connection between body and soul.
Marion Woodman, Coming Home to Myself: Reflections for Nurturing a Woman’s Body and SoulIf we are blindly living out an archetype, we are not containing our own life. We are possessed, and possession acts as a magnet on unconscious people in our environment. A life that is being truly lived is constantly burning away the veils of illusion, gradually revealing the essence of the individual.
Marion Woodman, The Pregnant Virgin: A Process of Psychological TransformationMany people are being dragged toward wholeness in their daily lives, but because they do not understand initiation rites, they cannot make sense of what is happening to them. They are being presented with the possibility of rebirth into a different life. Through failures, symptoms, inferiority feelings and overwhelming problems, they are being prodded to renounce life attachments that have become redundant. The possibility of rebirth constellates with the breakdown of what has gone before. But because they do not understand, people cling to the familiar, refuse to make the necessary sacrifices, resist their own growth. Unable to give up their habitual lives, they are unable to receive new life. Unless cultural rituals support the leap from one level of consciousness to another, there are no containing walls within which the process can happen. Without an understanding of myth or religion, without an understanding of the relationship between destruction and creation, death and rebirth, the individual suffers the mysteries of life as meaningless mayhem—alone.
Marion Woodman, The Pregnant Virgin: A Process of Psychological TransformationWhat I learned is the difference between of destiny and fate. We are all fated to die. Destiny is recognizing the radiance of the soul that, even when faced with human impossibility, loves all of life. Fate is the death we owe to Nature. Destiny is the life we own to soul.
Marion Woodman, Bone: Dying into LifeLinearity does not come naturally to me. It kills my imagination. Nothing happens. No bell rings. No moment of here and now. No moment that says yes. Without these, I am not alive. I prefer the pleasure of the journey through the spiral. Relax. Enjoy the spiral. If you miss something on the first round, don’t worry. You might pick it up on the second—or third—or ninth. It doesn’t matter. Relax. Timing is everything. If the bell does ring, it will resonate through all the rungs of your spiral. If it doesn’t ring, it is the wrong spiral— or the wrong time— or there is no bell.
Marion Woodman, Coming Home to Myself: Reflections for Nurturing a Woman’s Body and SoulA free woman has a strong neck—an open connection between heart and head, a balance between reality and ideals. To fall into the complex is to damn herself for her imperfections; to accept the attitude of the virgin is to accept her human life and open herself to her own truth.
Marion WoodmanWithout embodied soul, spirit cannot manifest through human feeling.
Marion Woodman, The Ravaged Bridegroom: Masculinity in WomenWhether we like it or not, one of our tasks on this earth is to work with the opposites through different levels of consciousness until body, soul and spirit resonate together. Initiation rites, experienced at the appropriate times in our lives, burn off what is no longer relevant, opening our eyes to new possibilities of our own uniqueness. They tear off the protective veils of illusion until at last we are strong enough to stand in our own naked truth.
Marion Woodman, The Pregnant Virgin: A Process of Psychological TransformationA woman must be able to stand in the face of power, because ultimately some part of that power will become hers.
Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the WolvesThis is your body, your greatest gift, pregnant with wisdom you do not hear, grief you thought was forgotten, and joy you have never known.
Marion WoodmanSo long as consciousness is enslaved by the darkness of unconsciousness, we blindly live out these handicaps in our lives, projecting them onto our men or choosing defeated men as an image of our own defeat. The flames of our fear, grief and rage burn without light. Without realizing what we are doing, we can allow consciousness to fall into the service of darkness. If, on the other hand, we are conscious of the darkness, that very consciousness is the light that illumines the darkness. This is the journey into mature consciousness, with arms and legs, heart and genitals, strong enough to bear the lights.
Marion Woodman, The Ravaged Bridegroom: Masculinity in WomenLiving by principles is not living your own life. It is easier to try to be better than you are than to be who you are.
Marion Woodman, Addiction to Perfection: The Still Unravished Bride:William Blake says the body is ‘that portion of soul discerned by the five senses.
Marion Woodman, Conscious Femininity: Interviews With Marion WoodmanLove is the real power. It’s the energy that cherishes. The more you work with that energy, the more you will see how people respond naturally to it, and the more you will want to use it. It brings out your creativity, and helps everyone around you flower. Your children, the people you work with–everyone blooms.
Marion WoodmanThe Crone has been missing from our culture for so long that many women, particularly young girls, know nothing of her tutelage. Young girls in our society are not initiated by older women into womanhood with its accompanying dignity and power. Without the Crone, the task of belonging to oneself, of being a whole person, is virtually impossible.
Marion Woodman, Dancing in the Flames: The Dark Goddess in the Transformation of ConsciousnessWomen are, by nature, disposed to relationship and connectedness; yet true relationship cannot be embraced until a woman as a deep sense of her at-one-ment. Without this essential independence from all roles and bonds, she is a potential victim for servitude.
Marion Woodman, Dancing in the Flames: The Dark Goddess in the Transformation of ConsciousnessShe dreams she is in a glass coffin. From her prison, details have beauty. In her aloneness, she imagines emotions. Her husband is the perfect bridegroom, the trickster, the small boy looking for mother. She is goddess and mirror, siren and friend, femme fatale and sacrificing wife. He is attracted to her girlhood purity, her desire to sacrifice, to serve. At first he may be flattered: she sees him as a god.
Marion Woodman, Coming Home to Myself: Reflections for Nurturing a Woman’s Body & SoulSince she has not been present in the culture, she has not been readily accessible to the conscious awareness of modern women. Without her, even the dynamic symbols of Virgin and Mother are distorted. The Crone is a woman is that part of her psyche that is not identified with any relationship nor confined by any bond. She infuses an intrinsic sense of self-worth, of autonomy, into the role of virgin and mother, and gives the woman strength to stand to her own creative experience.
Marion Woodman, Dancing in the Flames: The Dark Goddess in the Transformation of ConsciousnessCan I really believe I am worth an hour a day? Am I, who have given my life to others, selfish enough to take one hour a day to find myself?
Marion Woodman, Coming Home to Myself: Reflections for Nurturing a Woman’s Body & SoulChange means change. We may have all the insights, but if we do not incarnate them, they are all in vain.
Marion Woodman, Dancing in the Flames: The Dark Goddess in the Transformation of ConsciousnessWe know we can change ourselves when we realize that we are not dependent on how we feel, nor on how others feel about us, nor on what the situation is around us. The values we hold, the choices we make within ourselves and for iourselves remain our prerogative. In most situations, if we begin to change, to do our own inner work, to accept our own darkness and work toward consciousness, the situation will change. We will begin to emanate a different energy, one that exudes a sense of autonomy and authenticity.
Marion Woodman, Dancing in the Flames: The Dark Goddess in the Transformation of ConsciousnessIt takes great courage to break with one’s past history and stand alone
Marion WoodmanOnce the purging has taken place, the woman often dreams of a black goddess who becomes her bridge between spirit and body. As one aspect of Sophia, such an image can open her to the mystery of life being enacted in her own body. Her “mysterious and exotic darkness” inspires a particular depth of wonderment and love. For a woman without a positive mother, this “dark” side of the Virgin can bring freedom, the security of freedom, because she is a natural home for the rejected child. The child born from the rejected side of the mother can bring her own rebel to rest in the outcast state of Mary. In loving the abandoned child within herself, a woman becomes pregnant with herself. The child her mother did not nourish, she will now nourish, not as the pure white biblical Virgin who knew no Joseph, but as the dark Montserrat Virgin who presides over “marriage and sex, pregnancy and childbirth.” The Black Madonna is nature impregnated by spirit, accepting the human body as the chalice of the spirit. She is the redemption of matter, the intersection of sexuality and spirituality.
Marion WoodmanWe are all unconsciously bound to the wheel of fortune. It goes round and round and we go blindly around on it until one day something happens that wakes us up, face to face with ourselves. What for years we could not or would not see is made visible. The unconscious is made answerable to consciousness. The Self demands a reckoning: the ego must recognize what it has long feared and rejected. Whether we grow or wither in that encounter depends on whether we cling to our ego’s rigid standpoint or whether we choose to trust the Self and leap into the unknown.
Marion Woodman, The Ravaged Bridegroom: Masculinity in Women
Ive been rereading 'Women who run with the Wolves' and one of the parts has really inspired me to begin a new project...a book of poetry and artwork called Body that chronicles my life up to this point, from the perspective of my body. I want to try and capture what i felt for example, as a child, thru my bodys eyes, and as a teen, etc, thru preg and birth and afterbirthbody...etc etc. I am very excited to start this because it really gives me a focus for creativity, which I have been trying to get fired up again lately. I know that I may not 'complete' this for a long time, but the structure of it gives me a little framework to pour my soul into. And I would like to welcome anyone else who wants to share their own creative voices of Body....
The Body theme is very important, especially now, because so many people are suffering due to the way society views and treats the body, and has done for so long....Also, from reading others' posts and blogs, especially mamas, I see how many people deal with issues related to the body, for different reasons. One way or another, Body is something we all take for granted, yet spend a huge chunk of our lives obsessing about.
Here is a passage that I found very beautiful.
"...The second awakening involved a much older woman. Her hips were, according to common standard, too pear-shaped, her bosom very tiny in comparison, and she had thin purply little veins all over her thighs, a long scar from a serious surgery going around her body from rib cage to spine in the manner in which apples are peeled. Her waist was perhaps four hands wide. It was a mystery then why the men buzzed about her as though she were honeycomb. They wanted to take a bite out of her pear thighs, they wanted to lick that scar, hold that chest, lay their cheeks upon ther spidery veins. Her smile was dazzling, her gait so beautiful, and when her eyes looked, they truly took in what they were looking at. I saw again what I had been taught to ignore, the power IN the body, The cultural power OF the body is its beauty, but power IN the body is rare, for most have chased it away with their torture or embarrassment by the flesh. It is in this light that the wildish woman can inquire into the numinosity of her own body and understand it not as a dumbbell that we are sentenced to carry for life, not as a beast of burder, pampered or otherwise, who carries us around for life, but as a series of DOORS AND DREAMS AND POEMS thru which we can learn and know all manner of things. In the wild psyche, body is understood as a being in its own right, one who loves us, depends on us, one to whom we are sometimes mother, and who sometimes is mother to us."
from Clarissa Pinkola Estes' 'Women who run with the Wolves'
I think that especially for a mother, loving Body and being Body is very important. Imagine trying to explain to your little baby or child that you dont like or appreciate the body that they adore, that they take so much delight in, and find their sense of comfort and warmth and strength? Until I had my son, my body was this abstract thing, really...I was never very connected to it, certainly wasnt EMBODIED...and actually seemed to hold in higher esteem being OUT OF BODY or OF THE SPIRIT...It took pregnancy and childbirth to fully connect me to my body and to really understand Body...as a force as well as a form. I spent years trying to get away from Body, hiding from Body, denying Body...and now it seems to me to be blasphemy...in some sense...Things that I thought I understood back then were just intellectual gropings....now I have True knowing, True Feeling, True Selfness....not a delusion of grandeur...but a participation in something that is so immense and whole and wonderful in so many ways, and that Body is here in order to take this Isness into Herself and Express it in ways that could not exist if Body Were NOT... We as a culture have degraded flesh for so long, and it has led to so many problems on many levels... People seem to believe that if you allow the Body what Body wants, you will be 'led astray'...haha...but I have yet to meet more than a few people who have actually been embodied in the full sense of the word. And there is nothing to be led astray from. Body will lead us home. Body is our ability to relate to other selves and worlds and ideas and vibrations and realitys....Body doesnt hinder us in the pursuit of 'enlightenment'....Body IS enlightenment.... Its not so much that we need to bring awareness into the body, but to allow the bodys awareness to LEAD US OUT of our preoccupation with our prison walls, which we have built around ourselves because Feeling is so damn intense and so completely overwhelming that living a half life is preferable for most. And body gets blamed for keeping us 'beastly' or 'dense and profane'...etc etc....I believe this is all backward. I think that only the truly courageous and those who dearly want to become as conscious as they can be, even attempt to understand and honor Body, because to do so would make most everything else we know seem very insignificant.
So here is to Body. In all her forms. In all her force. And with all her faces turned to the earth... because Body does not need to seek the light....the light seeks her... for it is the joy of the universe which dances in her thighs...
And here is to all the Mamas who have been thru the primordial creation thru her own body here now
BlissNinja 